Frequently Asked Questions

• The Oregon Capacity System is a new statewide command center software solution for hospital capacity and critical resource management developed by GE Healthcare and Apprise Health Insights.
• This system pulls data directly from the electronic medical records (EMR) of every hospital in Oregon and feeds it into the Oregon State Capacity System, all fully automated in near real-time while ensuring patient privacy is appropriately protected. 
• Information is then made available to all participating organizations via a website which is easily accessible from any device or projected on a screen and refreshed every five minutes. 

• Oregon’s Statewide Capacity System is currently tracking 7,368 beds and approximately 800 ventilators across 60 hospitals in Oregon. The system will be scaled to track all 65 hospitals in Oregon by Summer of 2022. 

• Apprise Health Insights and GE Healthcare are expanding the system beyond tracking current beds and ventilators only, to tracking and processing more than five million data points per day, including acute, pediatric, ICU, specialty, rehab and psych bed availability data as well as PPE, Emergency Department and Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) availability. 

• Apprise Health Insights will lead the operation of the system. A governance group made up of hospital and healthcare system leadership, with both technical and operational expertise, and advisors from other stakeholders will provide overall system management and oversight. 

• Prior to the pilot project that began in March 2020, hospitals in Oregon, like every other state, tracked and reported capacity information manually, retroactively, and individually, resulting in outdated reports and potentially week-old data. 
• By pulling data directly from the EMR, the OCS removes the need to manually track and enter capacity information. It also tracks data in near near-time. Staff who have used the system say it provides them with more accurate information (than working without it) on bed capacity across hospitals. 

• Near-time data to manage patient surges is critical to maximize resources. Previously you could face a situation where one hospital in Portland had a few ICU beds and ventilators and another was overwhelmed without enough beds or ventilators for patients. And there was no way to know, in near real-time, where the hospital and ventilator capacity were in and around Portland to better direct patients.
• By giving hospitals clear line of sight into bed availability across the state, the Oregon Capacity System enables healthcare organizations to distribute patients at a regional and state-wide level to make the most of existing capacity and equipment, minimizing the negative, sometimes fatal impact of a delayed bed assignment and ability to initiate care in a timely manner.

The only prerequisite to implement this type of system is to have a digitized hospital information system or electronic medical record, which most hospitals in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East already do. Since hospitals are already collecting this data, it takes very little time for the IT team to build the data extraction scripts and then send the data in the necessary way.   Contact us to discuss how this system might work for your state or region.

The OCS circumvents concerns around privacy by removing sensitive data before collection. No patient names, no identifiable information ever enters the system or leaves the hospital.